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Adobe's Apollo Promises to Bridge Online and Desktop Experience

7 replies on 1 page. Most recent reply: Mar 22, 2007 5:31 AM by alpha alpha

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Frank Sommers

Posts: 2642
Nickname: fsommers
Registered: Jan, 2002

Adobe's Apollo Promises to Bridge Online and Desktop Experience Posted: Mar 20, 2007 4:42 PM
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Summary
Adobe released this week the first public preview of its new rich-client technology, Apollo. Built on top of the open-source WebKit browser toolkit, Apollo enables the creation and desktop integration of Web applications incorporating a combination of HTML, Ajax, and Flex.
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Adobe this week released the first public preview of its long-anticipated new desktop rich-client technology, code-named Apollo. Apollo is based on the open-source WebKit, the same software that is also at the core of Apple's Safari and the KDE project's Konqueror browser.

Apollo, according to Adobe chief software architect Kevin Lynch, is the first significant outcome of the Macromedia/Adobe merger:

We both saw over time that Macromedia would be adding electronic document capability to RIAs [rich Internet applications] and that Adobe would add RIA capability around electronic documents. Rather than pursue those paths separately and duplicate efforts, we joined forces to deliver our vision for the next generation of documents and RIAs, bringing together the world's best technology for electronic documents and the world's best, most pervasive technology for RIAs.

Lynch noted that Apollo will enable new types of applications that combine features of online and offline software:

Apollo enables people to more easily maintain a connection with information in their web applications. Just like a desktop app, Apollo applications have an icon on the desktop, in the Windows start menu, or in the OS X dock. Also, when you're running a web application today, it's a separate world from your computer. You can't easily integrate local data with your web app. For example, you can't just drag and drop your local contacts onto a web-based mapping application to get directions to your friend's house. With Apollo applications you will be able to this kind of integration as it bridges the chasm between your computer and the Internet.

Lynch also pointed out that Apollo's goal is to make the development of rich-client desktop applications easier. For instance, the simplest Apollo applications can be built entirely with HTML, while more complex applications can incorporate Flex, and even combine HTML, JavaScript, and Flex:

With Apollo, you can leverage existing web development skills (HTML, Flash, JavaScript, Ajax, Flex) to build and deploy RIAs to the desktop. Just like web publishing allowed anyone with basic HTML skills to create a website, Apollo will enable anyone with basic web development skills to create a desktop application. The HTML engine in Apollo is WebKit, which is open source and is also used Apple's Safari browser.

What do you think of Apollo's approach of combining the desktop and online experience?


alpha alpha

Posts: 8
Nickname: alpha512
Registered: Mar, 2007

Re: Adobe's Apollo Promises to Bridge Online and Desktop Experience Posted: Mar 20, 2007 7:32 PM
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Don't belive in promises of propetary Frameworks and tools. Do you remember Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, Delphi? where are all those propetary programming languages and frameworks?, They are sinking my friend. I think it's waste of time and money to invest on propetary tools. Better go for open standards like Java and Openlazslo, EcmaScript(Javascript) so on. You will be more safe to put your time and money invested on those tools. Life is short so dont waste your life in propetaries software tools that sink and fail.

Steven E. Newton

Posts: 137
Nickname: cm
Registered: Apr, 2003

Re: Adobe's Apollo Promises to Bridge Online and Desktop Experience Posted: Mar 20, 2007 8:17 PM
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Note that MIT has dropped a subscription to an online journal because it uses proprietary Windows-only Adobe DRM software.

http://news-libraries.mit.edu/blog/archives/category/subject-areas/engineering/

Dick Ford

Posts: 149
Nickname: roybatty
Registered: Sep, 2003

Re: Adobe's Apollo Promises to Bridge Online and Desktop Experience Posted: Mar 21, 2007 4:22 AM
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Apollo looks interesting from a development perspective, but I'm not sure that moving to the desktop will be all that enticing for developers.

I downloaded the runtime and ran a sample app. It was just a little gmail thingie, but I guess somewhat interesting because of Webkit.

Achilleas Margaritis

Posts: 674
Nickname: achilleas
Registered: Feb, 2005

Re: Adobe's Apollo Promises to Bridge Online and Desktop Experience Posted: Mar 21, 2007 6:57 AM
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I don't think Apollo is going to be adopted, because developers don't want to work with multiple technologies, because it is proprietary, because yet another API will simply create a new set of problems, etc.

Frank Sommers

Posts: 2642
Nickname: fsommers
Registered: Jan, 2002

Re: Adobe's Apollo Promises to Bridge Online and Desktop Experience Posted: Mar 21, 2007 9:03 AM
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> Don't belive in promises of propetary Frameworks and
> tools. Do you remember Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, Delphi?
> where are all those propetary programming languages and
> frameworks?, They are sinking my friend. I think it's
> waste of time and money to invest on propetary tools.
> Better go for open standards like Java and Openlazslo,
> EcmaScript(Javascript) so on. You will be more safe to put
> your time and money invested on those tools. Life is short
> so dont waste your life in propetaries software tools that
> sink and fail.

Well, I wouldn't say that VB is "sinking and failing" or that .NET is "sinking." Even though Java itself wasn't open-source until very recently, it did quite well during its "proprietary" phase.

If you read the Apollo release docs, they do mention that Apollo is based on the open-source WebKit, and Adobe also released the Flash VM as an open-source Mozilla project.

I feel I have to comment on this in the name of fairness and accuracy.

Jeff Ratcliff

Posts: 242
Nickname: jr1
Registered: Feb, 2006

Re: Adobe's Apollo Promises to Bridge Online and Desktop Experience Posted: Mar 21, 2007 10:27 AM
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> Don't belive in promises of propetary Frameworks and
> tools. Do you remember Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, Delphi?
> where are all those propetary programming languages and
> frameworks?, They are sinking my friend. I think it's
> waste of time and money to invest on propetary tools.
> Better go for open standards like Java and Openlazslo,
> EcmaScript(Javascript) so on. You will be more safe to put
> your time and money invested on those tools. Life is short
> so dont waste your life in propetaries software tools that
> sink and fail.

Both Java and Javascript didn't start out as open standards, and it's way too early to say that Openlazslo has passed the test of time. Let's wait and see if a lot of people are still using it in 10 years. Actually, I'm not sure if many people are using it today.

alpha alpha

Posts: 8
Nickname: alpha512
Registered: Mar, 2007

Re: Adobe's Apollo Promises to Bridge Online and Desktop Experience Posted: Mar 22, 2007 5:31 AM
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Actually MS destroyed VB introducing the VB.NET, it is another language and programming model. I agree Java was propetary at the begining but Sun introduced the JCP so it was more of an open standardization process for Java that anything Microsoft or other propetary company offered. So I want to be on the safe path with Java. I know as a developer I have to learn new programming languages and technologies at sometime but also as I said in my first post
I dont have 2 lives to invest my time entirely learning new programming languages and frameworks everytime they show up. So thats why I choose Java becuase is more safe to invest on it that another propetary tool as Microsoft or Adobe tools.

About Apollo I dont know much yet about it but as you said I read it and yeah they are using WebKit but thats just the rendering HTML part of the framework, what about the other parts?, Sorry I didn't know Flash VM was opensourced.

Really we have 3 great platforms to develop right now Java, .NET and LAMP(Python, Ruby) with all the WEB 2.0 support, Why we need another platform and tools to develop?.

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